Ranga Myneni named a Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson-Reuters

In creating the list, Thomson-Reuters collected data on articles indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection from 2002 to 2012, selecting only articles that were labeled as Highly Cited Papers. As their website explains, “Highly Cited Papers are defined as those that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year indexed in the Web of Science.” This process, they claim, eliminated “the citation disadvantage of recently published papers relative to older ones, since papers are weighted against others in the same annual cohort.”

Researchers were then selected and ranked based on the number of “citations to his or her Highly Cited Papers to rank in the top 1% by total citations in the ESI field in which they were considered.” The Essential Science Indicators, or ESI, fields are “21 broad fields defined by sets of journals and exceptionally, in the case of multidisciplinary journals such as Nature and Science, by a paper-by-paper assignment to a field.”

Their selection process yielded the top 1% of researchers in 21 different scientific fields.

Myneni was selected in the top 1% of researchers in the field of geosciences. He was one of nine Boston University researchers included on the list and the only Boston University selection in the field of geoscience.

To learn more about the methodology behind the selection of the 2014 Highly Cited Researchers list, visit Thomson-Reuters’s website.